Five things ‘I’ve Ben thinking about’…

Is today the day we get hit with a major amendment to our gun control policy (if you want to call it that). Rumor has it there are 19 areas where the President could use executive orders to institute a new policy. One thing we do know is that the President will be joined by children, who have written him about guns, when he announces his proposals. I’ve always said this president gets marketing like no other.

On to the rest of the five:

Guns, or lack of them. One more thought on this – personally, I’m looking forward to hearing how anyone who voted for President Obama is responsible. I wonder if people will use the new Graph Search to find me or if they’ll just make sweeping, blanket statements? http://tinyurl.com/c7yxyjb

The big bite out of Apple’s stock. Did you see the beating Apple’s stock is taking? It was at $700/share in the fall – it’s down to $502 now on the reports that they’ve cut orders of components. Speculation is that the iPhone 5 isn’t performing as well as hoped and Apple is losing ground to Samsung. I guess we’ll find out on January 23 when Apple releases it’s earnings.

Just because everyone cheated doesn’t mean it’s ok to celebrate the biggest cheater. The fact that so many people are debating Lance Armstrong’s legacy – on both sides – makes me think that all Barry Bonds had to do was raise a lot of money for cancer and he would have had a better shot of getting into the hall of fame. I’m a little surprised that so many people are saying things like ‘PEDs don’t change the fact that he raised a lot of money and was an inspiration.’ and ‘He was a still a great competitor – the playing field was equal because they were all doping.’ Really? So because everyone cheated it’s ok to celebrate the biggest cheater? And am I the only one who thinks that Armstrong capitalized on his foundation as much as he did his cycling? So you really can’t separate the two when debating his legacy, right?

We watched 11.3 billion online video ads last month. I don’t know what’s crazier – that, or the fact that it’s nearly doubled from last year (7.1B in December 2011). More than 53% of Americans saw an ad in December with the average user seeing nearly 70. tinyurl.com/appajwq

1.9% of Starbucks beverages were served in a personal tumbler in 2011. That’s a lot of tumbling! 34 million times to be exact. Well, it’s not good enough for Starbucks, who has an aggressive and well publicized sustainability strategy – for their next trick they want 5% by 2015. Now, for context, the tumbler growth was (kind of) small—1.5% in 2009, 1.8% in 2010 and 1.9% in 2011. So, their goal of 5% seems pretty aggressive. Get yourself up a cup of coffee, in a tumbler, kick-back and watch: should be interesting! tinyurl.com/cde44qc